John and Brenda Romero have seen the games industry at its lowest points. Having lived through the notorious 1983 video game crash, the couple and co-founders of Romero Games are well-positioned to compare that era to what's happening right now - and their verdict isn't comforting.
"We were there in the 80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier," the pair told GamesIndustry.biz, not mincing words about the scale of the current crisis hitting studios across the board.
A rough year for Romero Games
The comments carry extra weight given what the studio itself went through in 2024. Romero Games was blindsided by a sudden funding withdrawal that forced the team to dramatically downsize. It's the kind of rug pull that has become grimly familiar across the industry over the past two years, as investment dried up and publishers tightened their belts hard.
Despite the brutal hit, Romero Games is still operational. The studio is hanging on, which puts it ahead of many other teams that didn't survive similar shocks during the same period.
Context behind the comparison
The 1983 crash is the industry's definitive cautionary tale - a market flooded with low-quality titles and oversaturated hardware that wiped out consumer confidence almost overnight in North America. It took the arrival of Nintendo and the NES to revive things. For the Romeros to call the current situation worse is a striking benchmark from people who have decades of firsthand industry experience to draw on.
What makes today's climate particularly punishing is the combination of factors hitting simultaneously - rising development costs, post-pandemic investment corrections, widespread layoffs, and a consolidation wave that has reshaped or eliminated dozens of studios. Unlike 1983, this isn't a single market failure but a sustained, grinding contraction that has affected teams of every size.
The Romeros speaking openly about their own studio's near-miss adds credibility to an assessment that might otherwise sound hyperbolic. These aren't observers commenting from the sidelines - they're founders who nearly lost their own company to the same forces they're describing.
The full interview is available on GamesIndustry.biz, where the pair reflect further on navigating the crisis and what the path forward looks like for Romero Games.
